i would hate if they made little books but big internet stuff. I enjoy having all my D&D books in alphabetical order on the shelf in my room. I want the books to look impressive, after all, they are the first thing people see when they come in my room.
I know how you feel. I don't really care for reading electronic materials, and am extremely wary of buying eBooks and the like. Indeed, I've never bought such a thing. And I do rather like my 3.5e library.
But...
The reality is that that library is a real PitA. Even the most flavourful of the books in there has been read exactly once, and is highly unlikely to ever be read again. The only things I reference are things like spells, magic items, and monsters. But with the material spread across dozens of books and hundreds of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, and with no unified index, finding things is a pain. The net effect is that the overwhelming majority doesn't get used, will never get used, and won't even be
considered for use, simply because I can't lay my hands on it. That's really not efficient in any sense.
(And that's only the problem if I'm hosting the game. If I have to lug all that stuff to someone else's house to play... yeah, I'm not doing that.)
What I would dearly love would be for WotC to do an "encyclopedia version" of the game - reprint everything as-is, but reorganised by topic (a book with all the classes, some books with all the monsters listed in strict alphabetical order, etc). If they did that, I would rebuy everything, even at a cost of $1,000. (But they would need to guarantee it would never be added to, modified, or even heavily errata-ed. It really would need to be a definitive reference.)
But even
that would be less good than an 'encyclopedia' I could search automatically, I could select and organise as I needed... basically, an 3e version of the DDI Compendium would be a godsend. I would subscribe to DDI sight-unseen just for that. (And that's without even getting into a Character Builder, a Monster Builder, a character management app, and other possible tools.)
Plus, do it electronically and they don't need to promise it will never be expanded - it's trivial to add 'pages' into the middle of an electronic encyclopedia in a way that it just isn't with a hard-copy version. (The failed 2nd Ed Monstrous Compendium notwithstanding.)
The truth is that while physical books look better, and while they're better for reading, electronic versions are just better for
everything else. And they're cheaper to produce and maintain, they can be tied to a subscription for an ongoing revenue stream, and they allow the DDI offering to increase in value as the edition goes on.
(And paper is worse than that, too. In 3e, the biggest selling items outside of the core rulebooks were almost certainly the splatbooks. And people didn't really buy "Complete Warrior" for the advice on playing fighters, or whatever - they bought them for the new classes, prestige classes, magic items, etc; the stuff to add to their character. With 4e, though, all that material was automatically available through DDI. Producing the electronic version almost certainly canibalised sales of their biggest-selling supplements, and did so to quite a large extent. Indeed, that's probably a factor in the 'failure' of 4e - enough people used DDI instead of the books that the books didn't really succeed, but not quite enough subscribed to DDI to make that a success in itself. In effect, they competed with themselves and turned one success into two failures.)
Incidentally, going back to my "if I were in charge at WotC" thesis, I think I might well be inclined to get rid of the e-magazines as such, in favour of an ever-expanding library of articles (all extensively cross-referenced, tagged, and hyperlinked, of course), with new content being produced on a regular schedule. But the key thing I would be inclined to do would be to offer all (seriously, 100%) of the non-setting-specific* 'fluff' material for free download... but keep the 'crunch' material blocked off behind the paywall. That way, the fluff acts as an advertisement for the contents, but all the bits that people (esp. players)
really want - the new monsters, the powers for their characters, etc - are held back.
And sure, that means that if you're interested but not actually playing D&D at present, you get access to an enormous amount of material for free. But it means that as soon as anyone
is playing, they will want to subscribe and they will want to maintain a subscription throughout. That
should be enough to sustain the service (frankly, it really needs to!).
As I said previously, under this model I wouldn't eliminate printed support entirely. But it would come after the electronic version (and after the errata had been applied), and would consist of reprints of that material. And given that the print runs would necessarily be small, it would be priced at a premium as well.
* The settings, of course, would remain behind the paywall. If you want to know about Eberron, you have to pay for it somehow!
(And just in case it isn't obvious: all of this is IMO, of course!)
